After various visits to Greece,
I wanted to make some kind of musical statement about ancient Greece,
which I had studied and thought about, a lot, and wherein, I believe,
has originated just about every good thought we've ever had about
evolving into a decent collective society with a worthwhile "high"
art.

For texts I have chosen the
words of (by most accounts) the greatest lyric poet of all time:
Sappho. The problem with these "snippets" (we don't really have much
of her work) is that, like Ancient Greek Musical fragments, we know
almost everything...except how they sounded. Modern attempts to
approximate the sounds of Sappho's ancient tests, (in spite of many
valiant efforts) ring don't ring true. And translations in to English
seem equally stilted. As Ezra Pound once rather testily remarked,
upon publication of yet another attempt: "Nobody seems to have
mastered the ladies' meter."

Every pictorial representation
of Sappho (mostly on Greek pottery) shows her with her lyre. Plainly
these texts were meant to be sung not spoken. And no one knows how to
do this! What I have attempted is a translation into modern Greek of
Sappho's fragments (with enormous amounts of help and encouragement
from Ross McGoulus and Professor Wagman. The later translations into
English are my own paraphrases.

The original version of these
songs is for soprano and guitar, which though not a lyre, is at least
a somewhat similar instrument. If the version with piano is
performed, the piano should sound not like a piano, but like some in
between instrument that has an unusual delicate mostly non legato
sound. And if a grand piano is used with the lid raised sufficiently,
the passages played with a plectrum (so indicated in the score) will
help deliver the unusual, ethereal quality that comes effortlessly
for a guitarist.

These songs are a collaborative
effort, and the result of actions and kindnesses by several people.
Dr. Frank Morris Chairman of the Classics Department at the College
of Charleston, allowing me to tag along with two of his Greek classes
in different years, is totally responsible for getting me to Greece
both times. Chasing around that incredible country for several weeks,
studying archeology and ruins and artifacts, art, drama and
philosophy there and on several of the islands in the Agean Sea made
the kind of indelible impression upon my psyche that somehow had to
be expressed in music.

Some time later guitarist Marc
Regnier and soprano Deanna McBroom, both of whom are colleagues of
mine on the faculty at the College of Charleston approached me to do
some songs for them. Deanna and Ross McGoulus, also a singer/teacher
and a wonderful musician/person who also is/speaks Greek, spent hours
helping me with the translations from Ancient, to Modern Greek, and
then to English, and then with the employment (of these wonderful
fragments by Sappho) Dr. Robert Wagman, Professor of Classics at the
University of Florida at Gainsville with his encyclopedic knowledge
of both ancient and modern Greek was by virtue of recent discoveries
able to help with insertions and translations of missing snippets in
the original text. The short story is that these songs are the
result.